Mountains of Coal
Posted August 2nd, 2007 by Antonia Malchik(Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness Radical Strip Mining and the Devastation of Appalachia, by Erik Reece, was published in the US in 2006, and also came out in paperback in the UK earlier this year. As a companion to this book, I also read Coal: A Human History, by Barbara Freese, which is indeed a fascinating history of our centuries-long relationship with coal, if a little sweeping in its summings-up. Highly recommended.)
I suppose it’s fitting that I chased our recent discussions concerning the environmental issues surrounding travel by reading a travel book related to a powerful environmental issue I’ve been following for several years: coal mining. In particular, the destructive form of complete strip mining known as “mountaintop removal,” which means exactly what it says. Entire mountains are demolished, layer by layer, their contents poured into valleys (later to be leveled and sold as largely unused “development areas”) to reach the coal seams below.
Coal is a commodity whose retrieval, use, and abuse have almost completely fallen off the international radar, but it shouldn’t have. People screeching about (in my view, largely pointless) carbon offset schemes for frequent fliers are culpable in much greater environmental catastrophes when they forget that a massive percentage of electricity in countries such as the US and China is supplied by coal-fired power plants. And those countries use a lot of electricity, including any that would power “clean” electric cars and trains. Almost any decent travel book on China alone has to mention coal mining in passing one way or another, it’s so prevalent.
My recent read focused on the US’s Appalachia region, an area I’ve never been to but whose beauties I’ve heard much of. In his book Lost Mountain, Erik Reece chronicles an ecological background to the region, one that makes it the “most diverse ecosystem on the continent.” Due to its protection from glaciers during the last Ice Age, as well as its escape from deforestation during settlement, Appalachia became the rainforest and nursery of North America, sending out seeds and wildlife to re-life a scarred landscape. But by the sounds of it, if I — and you — don’t go soon, there won’t be much of its beauty and diversity left to see.
For someone whose main travel passions focus on wilderness and open spaces, this book makes a heartbreaking read. Trees are mowed down and burned en masse (faster than trying to sell the timber), streambeds are completely filled in and choked off, birds and other wildlife disappear. And, finally, the mountain itself is gone. Reece, a native of Kentucky, although he doesn’t live in the coal mining region, has had a lifelong relationship with Appalachia’s wild places. Now he’s seeing them disappear, the mountains shaved flat one by one by a coal industry as ruthless as it is well-connected.
In September 2003 Reece decided to chronicle the disappearance of one particular mountain — named, aptly enough, Lost Mountain. Over the next year he visited Lost Mountain once a month, hiking its summit (until it was gone), hiding from the earth moving machines and earth-shaking blasters, chronicling the rich life of the mountain as it disappeared piece by piece.
He starts the journey by flying over the vast region of Kentucky that has already been stripped and flattened for its coal, as if to warn us as well as himself what is to come. “Dozers had carved up the rubble into this shifting landscape of vertical rock faces and long gray benches. A vast circuitry of haul roads wound through the rubble. It looked as though someone had tried to plot a highway system on the moon. … When we finally reached Robinson Forest, and were again flying over an unbroken ripple of green treetops, it felt like a great reprieve. Surrounded by such a sickly landscape, the forest looked so vital, so indomitable. But by that point I had already figured out that my grandfather’s religion was wrong: It doesn’t take a whole lot of faith to move mountains; it takes about ten men and a company called Caterpillar.”
The lynchpin of all this devastation is the people who live in Perry County, Kentucky, where Lost Mountain is — or was — located. Like any good traveller, Reece seeks them out. He reads their papers and visits their homes and attends their town meetings. These are the poorest people in America, many of whom depend on coal mining for their family’s income, many of whom somehow miss the connection between downed trees, flattened mountains, slurry-filled streams, and their own rising cancer and childhood illness rates. But these are his people, and this is their place. Those who are struggling against the coal mines find themselves helpless against vast, faceless, absent corporations and corrupt politicians.
Reece’s writing is careful, comprehensive, and as earth-shattering as the blasting mechanisms that do away with Lost Mountain. As he catalogues the missing pieces of the mountain over time, he also catalogues the region’s relationship with coal and mining companies over the last century, along with more recent political developments, which are few and none to encouraging. By the time Lost Mountain is gone, I felt as if I’d watched a dear friend die slowly and helplessly by torture and neglect in some foreign prison. But then, that’s the way I feel about nature.
Wendell Berry, the revered naturalist poet and essayist, contributes a short, powerful foreward to Reece’s tale. His words should be a call to any traveller or travel writer who travels for something beyond the satisfaction of their own curiosity: “Learning is painful. To know about strip mining or mountaintop removal is like knowing about a nuclear bomb. It is to know beyond doubt that some human beings have, and are willing to use, the power of absolute destruction. … A conservationist trying to oppose this enormity must accept heartbreak as a working condition.” And sometimes the travel writer must accept that they will be writing not about they see, but about what is no longer there.